The 1912 Duma Elections: The State, the Opposition and the Clergy

This article deals with the political situation around the elections to the State Duma of the Russian Empire in 1912 (4th convocation). The main actors of the campaign were the government, local administration, liberal opposition and the clergy of the Orthodox Russian Church. After the 1905 revolution, the “official Church” found itself in a difficult situation. In particular, anti-Church criticism intensified sharply and was expressed now quite openly, both in the press and from the rostrum of the Duma. A consequence of these circumstances was that in this Duma campaign, for the first time in the history of Russian parliamentarianism, “administrative resources” were widely used. At the same time, the authorities failed to achieve their political objectives. The Russian clergy became actively involved in the election campaign. The government sought to use the conflict between the liberal majority in the third Duma and the clerical hierarchy. Duma members launched an active criticism of the Orthodox clergy, using Grigory Rasputin as an excuse. Even staunch conservatives spoke negatively about Rasputin. According to the results of the election campaign, the opposition was even more active in using the label “Rasputinians” against the Holy Synod and the Russian episcopate. Forty-seven persons of clerical rank were elected to the House — three fewer than in the previous Duma. As a result, the assembly of the clergy elected to the Duma decided not to form its own group, but to spread out among the factions. An active campaign in Parliament and the press not only created a certain public mood, but also provoked a political split and polarization within the clergy. The clergy themselves were generally inclined to blame the state authorities for the public isolation of the Church. The Duma election of 1912 seriously affected the attitude of the opposition and the public toward the bishopric after the February revolution of 1917.

The Abduction of Preaching. Priest's Speech in the Structure of a Political Myth

This article offers an analysis of hybrid forms of religiousness arising from the interaction between the orthodoxy discourse and the political discursive environment. These forms are the result of attempted redirecting of the secular politics' tasks to the clergy and the church audience, that is, attempted political secularization of the Church.A precedent was the project to legitimize within the Russian Orthodox Church the so-called Maidan theology, which served as ideological accompaniment to the 2014 coup d'etat in Kiev. Since then, manifestations of political secularization have become regular.In September 2019, several dozen Orthodox priests published an open letter on the topic of the detention of street rioters during the Moscow City Duma election campaign. The letter had an emphatically political nature, as it was aimed at supporting people who were not simply seeking to state their views, but provoked the police to use force, escalating the conflict. The signatories of the appeal willingly or unwillingly joined this position, which at that time and in those circumstances meant direct interference in the political conflict. They had one important thing in common: they saw their own social role outside the church as more important than their servitude at church.The synthesis of Christian preaching and political propaganda is formed by stealing the language (in the sense established by Roland Barthes) of the Orthodox thought and is, therefore, doomed to create a hybrid, internally contradictory narrative that has nothing to do with authentic Christianity. This phenomenon can be characterized as the hijacking of the language of Christian preaching and the transfer of its sacred function into the sphere of the political. The most important task for Orthodox Christians is to purify, authenticate and naturalize the language of church mission, separating it from the influence of pseudo-Christian stylizations of secular politics and ideology.

Revolution as a Cultural Institute

The author of this article analyzes the concept of “revolution” and “revolutionism” in the contemporary culture. He defines the latter as one of the most important cultural institutions of modernity and regards it as a continuous and constitutive process in the New Age society, though acting most of the time in a latent form. Although the boundaries of the concept of revolution are extremely broad today, any study inevitably raises the question of the typology of revolutionary processes, to which the orthodox thought could provide an independent answer. Revolutions can be divided into two types. The first type is political revolutions, a change of political regimes. The second includes systemic revolutions, which lead to a change in the global cultural model. The revolution as a historical phenomenon, along with the subject of colonization, emerges from the Enlightenment and Reformation discourses, which replaced the Christian idea of the catechization of peoples. This led to the revolution becoming a reference point for a society that gravitated toward a radical reconstruction of institutions and identities and which was willing to pay a high moral price for it. Attention is paid to the quasi-religious foundations of revolutionary thought and revolutionary action. The results show that a modern society is a society with horizontal dynamics of development, and its social upheavals, often taking a radical revolutionary format, can only use Christian symbolism to disguise non-Christian content. The Soviet culture reproduced elements of religious practice because the new government clearly wanted to create its own rituals, as the deep religiousness of the people called for it. The main objective of this article is to structure and briefly describe the semantics of revolutionism, in which the eschatological, mystery and psychological aspects are highlighted, and the revolutionary ritual of sacrifice is examined. The author concludes that the authentic and truly spiritual alternative to the revolutionary constructivism of modern society includes the religious transformation of a man, as well as theosis and cosmotheosis, which can also change the existing social model.

Reaction of the Byelorussian Exarchate and the Roman Catholic Church to the August 2020 post-election protests in Byelorussia

In August 2020, the presidential elections took place in Byelorussia, which, according to official data, were won by A. G. Lukashenko by a wide margin. The announcement of the preliminary election results provoked a protest reaction of the opposition forces, who declared the results to be falsified and mobilized part of the Byelorussian population for mass street protests. The authorities deemed these actions illegal and used force to suppress them. This gave the opposition and protesters grounds to criticize the authorities with renewed vigor, accusing them of violence and infringement of political freedoms. The representatives of the Orthodox Church (the Byelorussian Exarchate of the Moscow Patriarchate) as well as of the Roman Catholic Church in Byelorussia reacted to the situation in the country, which caused a significant resonance in Byelorussia itself and abroad. The Byelorussian Exarchate did not support any of the conflicting sides, whereas Metropolitan Pavel, patriarchal exarch, unambiguously advocated the soonest cessation of the civil confrontation. At the same time, a few representatives of the clergy of the Byelorussian Exarchate publicly took the side of the protestors, including Archbishop Artemy of Grodno, but their statements were supported neither by the Synod of the Exarchate nor by the absolute majority of its bishops. The Roman Catholic Church, which has considerably smaller congregations in Byelorussia, also called for an end to the confrontation, but at the same time was much more immersed in the political agenda, poorly concealing its support for the opposition and protesters; the head of the Byelorussian Catholics at that time, Metropolitan T. Kondrusievicz, indirectly sympathized with the opposition as well. Despite the actual difference in the two churches' attitudes to the political situation, they both similarly appealed to spirituality and faith as a means of overcoming the conflict.

The Role of Political and Electoral Technologies in Continuing the Church and Civilization Schism in Ukraine

This article examines the impact of the church schism in 2018 on the change in the civilizational identity of modern Ukrainians. Modern Ukraine is in the zone of the conflict of Russian and Western civilizations, openly expressed since 2014. One of the strategies for resolving the conflict appears to be changing the civilizational identity of the enemy by transforming the cultural core of civilization, which also includes religion and religious practices. The transformation of the civilizational core in Ukraine occurs through the instrumentalization of religion, which turns into a way to solve the internal and foreign policy problems of the modern Ukrainian government. This article studies the history of the establishment of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in 2018, the reception of tomos from the Constantinople Patriarchate and the confrontation between the OCU and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), which acts as a conductor of the Russian civilization's influence. The internal goals of the Ukrainian government, achieved through a church schism, include reducing the consolidation of society and strengthening its own position in a fractured society. Their foreign policy objectives involve reducing the cultural influence of Russia, excluding the Russian part of the Ukrainian society from receiving the Russian civilization's values and changing the civilizational identity of Ukrainians. One way to change the civilizational identity of Russians in Ukraine while formally preserving the Orthodox religion in the country involves promoting eucharistic ecclesiology, which is not historically rooted in the Orthodox Church and has been developing since the mid-20th century as an alternative to the universal ecclesiology. The latter assumes that the universal church is not reduced to the sum of its parts, that the criterion for correct faith is the unity of the episcopate, and that maintaining the integrity of the empirical church is one of the values of church communion. Eucharistic ecclesiology presumes that the fullness of grace is contained in each experiential community united by the common Eucharist. Eucharistic ecclesiology aids in instrumentalizing the church and turning it into the spokesperson for the secular interests of communities, which is already happening in Ukraine. This article shows that despite the church schism itself does not remove Ukrainians from the Russian civilizational space, it includes church communication into the foreign policy of reducing the Russian cultural influence in Ukraine and changing the civilizational identity of its inhabitants.

Political Ideas and Political Struggle of the Pre-Revolutionary Russian Clergy (The Case of the Ryazan Diocese)

This article, written using the materials of Ryazan diocesan press, studies the history of the formation of political ideas and the political struggle of pre-revolutionary Russian clergy. In the process of forming separate spiritual estate and system of the rationalized Latin-speaking spiritual education within the Russian Empire, the clergy becomes one of the forces modernizing the country, while perceiving itself as the enlightener and the civilizer of people. The state saw the clergy as petty officials, but the clergy were not willing to accept this role. During the creation of elementary school in the system of the Ministry of State Property, the clergy strengthened their social position and acquired many years of teaching experience. The liberal nobility feared that the clergy would take the lead in rural life by alienating the landlords. Zemstvos begin to fight to push the clergy away from the peasants, squeezing the clergy out of schools. At the same time, churches start opening schools en masse. The clergy enters a political struggle with the liberal gentry. Church periodicals began to appear, shaping the political stance of the clergy. The clergy sees itself as a separate politicum, which can be higher than zemstvos as all-empowerment bodies. Diocesan congresses, as well as district and parochial assemblies start appearing as a means of unification and consolidation of the clergy.The necessity of intra-church democracy, while ignoring the canonical role of the bishop and mass media's leading role, becomes a dominant idea in the clergy's life until the Revolution of 1917. These democratic representations in the Ryazan diocesan press were not called “sobornost” anymore but were political in nature. For utilitarian purposes, the state power supported such aspirations of the clergy during the 1912 election campaign to the State Duma. The clergy had the opportunity to realize their political views during the February Revolution of 1917 and fully supported it. Diocesan bishops were expelled, each parish was considered as a separate “local church”. The clergy sought to remain unelected and beyond the control of the parishioners, although they themselves insisted on electing diocesan bishops. However, parishioners turned their backs on their pastors. Some clergy were expelled from parishes, others limited the level of fees for services. Representatives of the laity and lower clergy drove the clergy out of elected parish and diocesan authorities. As the revolution developed and the country descended into chaos, the clergy, who had taken part in these processes, did not accept their share of responsibility for what was happening; on the contrary — they blamed the “ignorant” people for the church trials.

The Constantinople Patriarchate and Orthodoxy in the US Politics: From Roosevelt to Biden

This article studies the US administration's policy towards the Orthodox Church, its historical genesis and the factors influencing the current situation in the Orthodox world. The key role in this direction of the US politics belongs to the Constantinople Patriarchate as a tool for confronting Russia and dividing the Orthodox world. The author examines the connections of the new US President Joe Biden with the Constantinople Patriarchate, including the facts of Constantinople's support of Biden's political course. Constantinople's latest social document and hierarchical actions demonstrate loyalty to the US Administration's policy and globalist ideas, in addition to Constantinople's attempts to politicize the religious factor in promoting “democracy”. The cooperation between the Constantinople Patriarchate and US Administration, which began in 1940s, resulted in high dependence of this church structure upon the US political interests. The author states that Fener and Washington support each other and coordinate their actions: they have attempted open aggression against the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church as a whole, which resulted in destroying the unity of the Orthodox world. The Constantinople Patriarchate's affiliation with the political interests of the United States and the Democratic Party leads them to avoid criticizing abortion and LGBT ideology and preventing the development of modernist tendencies within their Church. This causes discontent among priests and laymen, as well as their departure for other jurisdictions, including the Russian Orthodox Church. In the coming years, the dramatic events in the Orthodox world will most likely continue, and the US will proceed using one of the oldest local churches in its political interests.

Clergy Participation in Elections, Political Parties and Government from the Perspective of Secular and Church Law

This article presents a comparative analysis of solving the issue of Orthodox clergy's participation in elections, political parties and public bodies previously and in modern times from the standpoint of secular and church law. At different stages of history, there were both times when the clergy took active part in the legislative bodies of our country and abstained from it. The relevance of this question is conditioned by the following fact: while the Church is unified and its establishments are inviolable, there are historically many states of many types, and the relations between them should always be adjusted specifically to each case. There is no general theoretical formula that would suit them all. The clergy participated in political parties, elections and the State Duma before the revolution, but the results of this participation were very mixed. In the post-Soviet years, after the constitutional crisis of October 1993, the Church made the only right decision. At an expanded session on October 8, 1993, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church adopted a resolution that instructed clergy to refrain from participating in the elections to the Federal Assembly as candidates for deputy, and to abstain from membership in political parties under the penalty of prosecution. As for the Church law, the canons of the Orthodox Church do not permit clergymen to hold secular positions of authority. This is confirmed by the Apostolic Rules and decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. Adopted in 2000 by the Jubilee Council of Bishops, “The Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church” reflected the official position of the Moscow Patriarchate in its relations with the state and secular society . The Fundamentals formulate a concept of the state-church relations, the key concept of which is “the cooperation between state and church”. However, by prohibiting the clergy to participate in government bodies, the Church emphasizes its another resource: the participation of Orthodox laymen in the activities of government bodies and parties. The contemporary challenges include an enormous increase in the influence of the Internet, mass media, the ethical problems of modern technology, the lack of an Orthodox component in educational programs — they are only a few problems and challenges to the dialogue between church and state.

Totalitarian Sects within the Current Political Processes

This article studies the phenomenon of totalitarian sects entering politics. It concerns the participation of totalitarian sects in the political processes and election campaigns with the aim of getting into power, as well as the attempts of some political figures to rely on the infrastructure of totalitarian sects in order to promote themselves in the ruling structures. The author summarizes the works of Russian and international social thinkers and religious scholars, studying totalitarian sects as a relatively new social and religious phenomenon, supplementing and developing their findings. In particular, the following features are recognized as the key characteristics of totalitarian sects. A relatively recent foundation — usually with the founder still alive. A charismatic leader — the founder or successor, who has unquestionable authority. Closed information environment, filtering any external information signals. Careful regulation of the adherents' life, as well as their double code language, allowing them to recognize others in a “friend-or-foe” mode, which likens totalitarian sects to criminal communities. A rigid hierarchy that doses information about the organizations' goals to its members at different levels of initiation; adherents' compulsory financial participation and preaching activities. The author analyzes the promotion of totalitarian sects in politics using examples from Ukrainian and Russian political practices of the post-Soviet period. In particular, he studies the political activities of such structures as the Livets Ord (lit. “Word of Life”) Baptist Church, the Scientology Church, the Embassy of God sect (Sunday Adelaja), the Unification Church (Sun Myung Moon), the Living Word Baptist Church, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Last Covenant Church, Slavic neopagan groups and radical Islamist sects. The network community formed around the Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation also possesses the attributes of a totalitarian sect. Particular attention is paid to specific examples of the political involvement of totalitarian sects and their influence at different levels of government in Ukraine and in the Russian Federation, as well as the resulting damage. Considering the scale of totalitarian sects' activities in Russia — hundreds of such organizations are involved, up to 1 million people in total — the author emphasizes their use by foreign intelligence services, which poses a threat to Russia's national security.

Discourse of Freedom and Contemporary Greco-Protestantism

In this article, the author provides an analysis of the “discourse of freedom” as one of the foundations for secular and ecclesiastical liberalism. The discourse of freedom receives the name of a “libertian discourse” (not to be confused with libertarianism — a specific political and ideological current). The libertian discourse is studied within its historical origins associated with the legal codes of ancient Rome and the social philosophy of the Enlightenment. The libertian discourse and the related concept of the “natural law”, hardly evolving and unchanged in the 300 years since its inception, has outlived its historical competitors in the form of historical law, Marxism, etc. This phenomenon of libertian fundamentalism refutes the liberal axiom of permanent social progress and modernization, which also applies to the sphere of knowledge. Since the concept of fundamental (generic) rights and freedoms can be neither scientifically proven nor deduced from the traditional norms and values, it should be classified as a metaphysical (in Karl Popper's sense), fundamentalist and quasi-religious doctrine. This article shows the contemporary transformations of the phenomenon of freedom, which results in the libertian discourse becoming an integral part of power practices, an exclusive right to criticize power and a “subtle discourse of power”. The contemporary function of libertianism lies in restricting the freedom of a political opponent in the name of fighting for freedom and in creating a marketable competitive field of political compensation for the restriction of freedoms (stigmatization). The author points to the struggle between two cultural-historical and religious paradigms with different understandings of freedom — the “Roman” (political, elitist) and biblical (social), emphasizing that this struggle generates two versions of the discourse of freedom in the contemporary political space. The author raises the question of the demarcation of freedom paradigms on the same grounds as the more general question of “paradigms of involvement with the transcendent” and the hybrid mixing of different paradigmatic foundations in the modern interpretation of freedom.